Relative Something

As always, we arrived home yesterday with a royal greeting from our animals. After unpacking the foodstuffs that made the trip home with us and then gobbling up some of it for lunch, we granted Delilah her wish and headed outside to survey the grounds.

The first thing I noticed was how much some of the grass has grown since I last cut it. At the same time, the ground seems incredibly dry. Parched and cracked enough that I don’t understand the hearty growth of some areas of grass.

The next noteworthy thing that caught our attention was the incredible buzzing sounds of a striking number of bees busy in the yellow flowering tops of goldenrod beside one of our trails.

Cyndie did a great job of capturing a photo of a couple of the happy visitors.

Not far down that same trail, we made another surprising discovery. Tucked behind a large viburnum nannyberry bush was a volunteer apple tree with an impressive amount of fruit on its limbs. It’s the first time I noticed it, which is surprising because we usually pay a lot of attention to the volunteer trees showing up beside our trails.

We made our way out into the pastures to say hello to the horses and quickly decided they were telling us the flies were bothering them. Cyndie went back and got their fly masks. The growth in the pastures is a mixture of good grass they looked very happy to be munching and a disturbing number of problematic weeds.

I will be mowing the pastures to a pretty short height as soon as I can get to it in attempt to control some of the weed propagation.

I re-stacked the dwindling number of hay bales in the shed to make room for the next delivery, now expected to arrive on Friday. By then, Cyndie will be on her way to Boston with her mother to visit Barry and Carlos. I will be stacking bales by myself.

The last stop for Cyndie on the tour of our property was her garden. She came in with quite a bounty of a photogenic variety of vegetables.

She thinks some of the growth was stunted by how dry it has been, but the overall variety of produce sure looks impressive. Pretty good for a year when her planting was hindered by knee replacement surgery back in the spring.

We’re just happy to have any bounty at all.

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